The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Significant features include additional support for Compiz as a window manager with Kicker, session management for browser tabs in Akregator,
templating for KMail messages, faster frame rates with video chat in Kopete and new summary menus forKontact making it easier to work with your appointments and to-dos.

This release includes a number of bugfixes for KHTML, Kate,
Kicker, KSysGuard and lots of other applications. Translations continue as well, with the most improved coverage coming from the Galician translation team. KDE now
supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most proprietary software and can be easily extended to support others by communities who wish
to contribute to the open source project.

I have installed it in Kubuntu using latest Beryl from Treviño's repository and the taskbar still shows windows from all desktops. Pager was working before KDE 3.5.6 (Kubuntu included a patched pager) so I don't know what does Kicker include to support Compiz (well, I'm using beryl instead).

Session Management for browser tabs in Akregator is nice, as Akregator still crashes for me under certain circumstances (certain sites; navigating back and forth..)

Now I only hope for session management in Konqueror (yes I know about profiles, but it's nowhere near a real session behaviour), this could also pave the way for recovering of closed tabs.

Since Konqueror got much faster with many tabs opened, it is on its way to be as usable as Opera for me.. only some finetuning on interface and handling is needed, technical foundation and integration with KDE is already at a high level.
Only the somewhat better mouse gestures, clicking on tabs to minimize it, and some other Opera niceties prevent me from using Konqueror as my main browser. A nice plugin interface could work wonders for Konqueror as a webbrowser and raise it's popularity, just like with KDE's servicemenus.

btw: Does anyone know a way to close tabs with the third mouse button? Couldn't find an option in the preferences.
Currently third mouse button drags tabs, while left mouse button copies the link from one tab to another (which is imho quite unexpected and not really often used).
I would propose to bind (pressed) left mouse button to dragging of tabs and to use the (clicked) third button to close the tab (right button is for the tab options). This is how it works in Opera and Firefox (by default? not sure). The usability should be much higher.

i have a closebutton on the tabs which shows when you mouseover the tab. and i love the drag'n'drop of tab's between and within konqueror windows, why would we want to loose that feature? you can even drag a tab on the kicker or on the desktop so it forms a link to an application. you can drag it to a document and insert the link, or to the run command applet for kicker...

and middlemouse moves tabs, works fine for me...

and you seem to confuse session support in KDE with opera's session support. In KDE, it means if you log out and come back, your session is restored. akkregator didn't support that (but konqueror always has). you can't save a session from a single app and restore it when you restart the app - would be cool, but it's not there yet.

The close button is in the options, but it takes the website icon away. Opera/Firefox have the close button additionally on the right side of the tab. Would be a good start to do that.
The drag and drop of tabs is useful, that's why I think it should be on the left mouse button. Left mouse button currently copies the link from one tab to another so you got the same page twice.. which is like duplicating the tab. I really don't know what that is meant for.
Perhaps a smart behaviour could integrate both: dragging on the tab pane moves the tab, draggin the tab somewhere else, e.g. to the desktop or a file view copies it. That's also what I do quite often, I just don't think copying the link to another tab is really useful.
Just in case it was not clear, the proposal was do reassign the different available functions to other input methods (other mouse buttons) so it works more like the other browsers. When work is being done on Konqueror webbroser interface, it will hopefully get streamlined and adjusted to behave like the other browsers (and be configurable with a GUI).

I really was not clear with the sessions and mixed up three different features. KDE-wide session support doesn't help you when Konqueror crashes during a session, so your opened sites are gone.
That's why I'm hoping for recovery after crash, reopen (recover) closed tabs (like the trash icon or CTRL-Z in Opera) and management of sessions (save/open opened tabs to reopen them later). The last one is already there behind the profiles, but it's not that obvious.

Don't need to be, recovery after crashes has been there for a long time. Open Settings->Configure Extensions select Tools and enable Crashes Monitor. Next time Konqueror crashes, open Tools->Crashes (It's a plugins, so you may need to install it from the kdeaddons package).

Thanks for mail templates. This is an incredibly time-saving feature. I write daily about 100-200 mails with the BAT, most of them in under 2 seconds. Thanks to what BAT calls "Quick Templates", for offers, standard answers or customer information.

I've recently been trying to use kontact has my personal information manager, and am unable to send e-mails using my gmail account, I've followed the instructions in gmail help site with all the correct port, username (with @gmail.com) TSL (or something called like that), but for some reason I never can send an email, only receive.

Same problem here with some mail browsers. Though I can use my educational email account and prentend being somebody else... Wonder if I went wrong in configuration. It always sayd "no connection to computer mail.xxx.de".

well, I have been trying to sign my sending messages with Kmail but it never worked. WITHOUT asking for any password in order to use appropriate keys, it is always showing the message "wrong pass-phrase". I have both the pinentry and pinentry-qt installed. I am using FC-6.

pinentry-qt on my kubuntu edgy crashes ( a dialog "flashes" then disappears ). On googling this bug seems to be known for years but somehow remains. You may want to try
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
instead.

Why there are no references to KDevelop?
This news, the KDE announcement and the KDE changelog, all does not mention KDevelop. Why?
It should have been upgraded from 3.3.x releases to 3.4.x, with _a lot_ of new features and bug fixes.